Link tags: fairness

My comments to Competition and Markets Authority on mobile browser competition - Alistair Shepherd

A thoughtful response to the current CMA consultation:

The inability to compete with native apps using Progressive Web Apps fully—particularly on iOS—also has a big impact on my work and the businesses I have worked with. Progressive Web Apps are extremely accessible for development, allowing for the creation of a simple app in a fraction of the time and complexity of a native app. This is fantastic for allowing smaller agencies and businesses to innovate on the web and on mobile devices and to reach consumers. However the poor support for PWA features by Safari and by not allowing them in the App Store, Apple forces app development to be difficult, time consuming and extremely expensive. I have spoken with many companies who would have liked an app to compete with their larger competitors but are unable to afford the huge costs in developing a native app.

Get your response in by Friday by emailing browsersandcloud@cma.gov.uk.

Care at Scale | Comment Magazine

A superb piece of writing by Debbie Chachra on infrastructure, fairness, and the future.

Alone in my apartment, when I reach out my hand to flip a switch or turn on a tap, I am a continent-spanning colossus, tapping into vast systems that span thousands of miles to bring energy, atoms, and information to my household. But I’m only the slenderest tranche of these collective systems, constituting the whole with all the other members of our federated infrastructural cyborg bodies.

Google’s Top Search Result? Surprise! It’s Google – The Markup

I’ve been using Duck Duck Go for ages so I didn’t realise quite how much of a walled garden Google search has become.

41% of the first page of Google search results is taken up by Google products.

This is some excellent reporting. The data and methodology are entirely falsifiable so feel free to grab the code and replicate the results.

Note the fear with which publishers talk about Google (anonymously). It’s the same fear that app developers exhibit when talking about Apple (anonymously).

Ain’t centralisation something?

Fair Is Not the Default - Library - Google Design

Why building inclusive tech takes more than good intentions.

When we run focus groups, we joke that it’s only a matter of seconds before someone mentions Skynet or The Terminator in the context of artificial intelligence. As if we’ll go to sleep one day and wake up the next with robots marching to take over. Few things could be further from the truth. Instead, it’ll be human decisions that we made yesterday, or make today and tomorrow that will shape the future. So let’s make them together, with other people in mind.

Why I Quit Ordering From Uber-for-Food Start-Ups by Robin Sloan in The Atlantic

Something to remember the next time someone describes an experience as “seamless” and means it to be positive:

This is the Amazon move: absolute obfuscation of labor and logistics behind a friendly buy button. The experience for a Sprig customer is super convenient, almost magical; the experience for a chef or courier…? We don’t know. We don’t get to know. We’re just here to press the button.

I feel bad, truly, for Amazon and Sprig and their many peers—SpoonRocket, Postmates, Munchery, and the rest. They build these complicated systems and then they have to hide them, because the way they treat humans is at best mildly depressing and at worst burn-it-down dystopian.

What would it be like if you didn’t have to hide the system?